Expatriates Women: 8th March 1909 to 2021
What about the 8th March
March 8 is International Women's Day, a day devoted to commemorating the movement for women's rights, which is celebrated worldwide. The earliest Women's Day observance, called "National Woman's Day", was held on February 28, 1909, in New York City, organized by the Socialist Party of America at the suggestion of activist Theresa Malkiel. There have been claims that the day was commemorating a protest by women garment workers in New York on March 8, 1857, but researchers Kandel and Picq have described this as a myth created to "detach International Women's Day from its Soviet history in order to give it a more international origin".
In August 1910, an International Socialist Women's Conference was organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspired in part by the American socialists, German delegates Clara Zetkin, Käte Duncker, Paula Thiede and others proposed the establishment of an annual "Women's Day", although no date was specified at that conference. Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights including suffrage for women.
The following year on March 19, 1911, International Women's Day (IWD) was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire alone, there were 300 demonstrations. In Vienna, women paraded on the Ringstrasse and carried banners honoring the martyrs of the Paris Commune. Women demanded that they be given the right to vote and to hold public office. They also protested against employment sex discrimination.
Women’s status: in the 1990s
The 1990s saw important developments that aided women`s participation. Concerns over the demographic time-bomb and a focus on competitive advantage sharpened employers` actions. As Adler remarked, companies could not overlook talent simply because it wore a skirt. The 1980`s drive for equal opportunities following on from discrimination legislation of the 1970s was given a further boost by the diversity movement in the 1990s. The continued decline in manufacturing and rise in services also favored women`s entry into the labour market, and rising achievement in further and higher education for women helped them to gain increasing footholds on the managerial ladder. However, the take-up of international assignments by women in the 1990s remained low. It seemed that organisational barriers remained.
As organisations come under increasing pressure to quicken the pace at which they internationalise and complete projects, at the same time reducing operational costs to ensure competitiveness, so traditional expatriation is giving way to alternative mobility strategies. The changing nature and quickening pace of the internationalisation of business is reflected in the changing nature of international assignment purposes and types, associated competency requirements and more flexible approaches to assignee deployment. Long-term postings in which the expatriate (usually male) is accompanied by partner and family are increasingly being replaced by alternative assignment types, such as short-term, commuter and frequent flyer assignments.
What if the economy shift was a positive opportunity for expatriate women
The nature of expatriation has changed, with increased emphasis on collaborative purpose (eg, via international joint venture, mergers and acquisition), developmental objectives (eg, training and development gaining in significance against the more traditional function of plugging skills gaps), and flexibility in deployment (eg, via short-term, commuter and frequent flyer assignments). Have these initiatives helped to support women`s participation? Women are stereotypically known for their collaborative and democratic leadership styles, their communication skills, which could be applied to training and coaching others, and their requirement for flexibility to balance their domestic and career concerns. Whether these assumptions about women reflect the new-style international assignment requirements and whether these can be addressed through international assignment policy initiatives has yet to be researched. Nevertheless, underpinning all of this is the role of wider employer policy and practice. Understanding of the role of policy initiatives is therefore required.
The #MeToo movement
In boardrooms around the world, business leaders are tuning in to the reality of the business case around inclusive practices making not only business sense, but also being the right thing to do. Everyone benefits from a more gender-equal world. Women in full employment leads to better inclusion and diversity of thought and the gains – economic and social – that come from that.
“A challenged world is an alert world,” says the organisers of the International Women’s Day global collective movement. “Individually, we're all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day. We can choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequity. We can choose to seek out and celebrate women's achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge.”
A peek into the future: what we could gain from greater gender equality according to McKinsey
“Our original Power of Parity research developed economic scenarios out to 2025. It defined a “best in region” scenario assuming that all countries matched the progress toward gender parity of the fastest-improving country in their region. For our calculations of the first-order economic impact of COVID-19 on gender equality, we have updated that analysis and pushed out the date to 2030 (see the sidebar, “Our methodology”). We modeled global estimates and focused further on six countries to understand regional differences: France, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United States.”
“We define three potential scenarios in the post–COVID-19 world of women at work. The first is a gender-regressive “do nothing” scenario. It assumes that the higher negative impact of COVID-19 on women remains unaddressed, and it compares GDP outcomes in 2030 to the case in which women’s employment growth tracks that of men in the recovery. The second is a “take action now” scenario, which would improve parity relative to the gender-regressive one. The third is a “wait to take action” scenario continuing until the economic impact of COVID-19 subsides. We have modeled this on the assumption that action to improve gender parity starts only in 2024.”
“The do-nothing scenario is the most negative one we modeled (Exhibit 3). The regressive labor-market outcomes described above would imply that women experience a disproportionate share of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This would slightly reduce the female-to-male labor-force participation rate, from 0.63 before COVID-19 to 0.61 in 2020. No new actions would be taken to improve gender parity between now and 2030, and the female-to-male labor-participation rate would remain stuck at 0.61. Under this scenario, global GDP in 2030 would be $1 trillion below where it would have been if COVID-19 had affected men and women equally in their respective areas of employment. Compared with that baseline, 33 million fewer women would find employment in this gender-regressive scenario in 2030.”
The best option is the “take action now” scenario, which amounts to a substantial economic opportunity. Policy makers would take decisions, in 2020 and beyond, that would significantly improve gender equality over the next decade. We estimate that the global value of achieving best-in-region gender-parity improvements by 2030 could lead to $13 trillion of incremental GDP in that year, an 11 percent increase relative to the do-nothing scenario. Across our six focus countries, the increase ranges from 8 percent to 16 percent. This scenario would also raise the female-to-male labor-force participation rate from 0.61 in 2020 to 0.71 in 2030—with the creation of 230 million new jobs for women globally, compared with the do-nothing scenario in 2030.
References:
https://www.relocatemagazine.com/articles/2691the-rise-and-rise-of-female-expatriates
"Give Us Women's Suffrage (March 1914)". German History in Documents and Images. Retrieved January 26, 2014.
"International Women's Day, 8 March". www.un.org. Retrieved March 7, 2020.
"International Women's Day 2020 around the world – in pictures". The Guardian. March 8, 2020.
"International Women's Day 2021". UNWomen. Retrieved January 15, 2021.
